The Charisma of Tibet

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The he Charisma of Tibet is the flowering (padma) of the jewelline (mani) Dharma (om) in its depths (hüm). This book surveys problems beginning with the statue of the Chinese Queen in the Potala, the role of Bactrians, the original home and Pure Land of Padmasambhava, the independence of Tibet throughout history, and so on. The 5th chapter begins with Tibet as the source of all the major rivers of Asia, the 6th details historical works, the 7th is the palaeography of Indic scripts in manuals, the 8th sketches iconographic xylographs, the 9th is on some philosophical texts, and 10th is on Sanskrit- Tibetan lexicography. The last chapter has the unknown Mangalāştaka of Kälidāsa both in Sanskrit and Tibetan. The fourfold classification of Tantras, modelled after the four sections of a Śaiva āgamas is discussed. The origin of the toponym Oddiyāna, the restoration of the purity of the Bodhisattva's path by Śrīdīpańkara-jñāna, report of an interview of Prof. Raghuvira with Dr. Heinrich Harrer, a Tibetan roll discovered in a statue from Nalanda, the writing of Tibetan textbooks as the Tibetans started coming to India in large numbers, the historic studies of Körösi Csoma Sandor that laid the foundations of scientific Tibetology, and the development of ayurveda in Tibet. The book is a complete record of the Tibetan studies of Prof. Raghuvira and his son Lokesh Chandra to whom it was seeking the soul of Buddhist culture. The Avatamsaka-sūtras say: "Mind makes the Buddhas".

Lokesh Chandra is Director of the Inter- national Academy of Indian Culture, a premier research institution for Asian cultures. He is President of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and has been Chairman, Indian Council for Historical Research. He is a well- known historian and renowned scholar of Tibetan, Mongolian, SE Asian, and Sino- Japanese Buddhism. He has also served as a member of the Indian Parliament. In 2006, he was honored with the Padma Bhushan. He was born in 1927, obtained his Master's degree in 1947 from Punjab University (Lahore) and followed it with a Doctorate from the State University of Utrecht (Netherlands). Starting with an understanding of the most ancient of India's spiritual expression enshrined in the Vedic tradition, he has moved on to the interlocution between India, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Indo-European languages. He has studied over twenty languages, and has 602 works and text editions to his credit.

All that sleeps in time lives as the source of inner riches. In the living fire of incarnate minds (agnim ide purohitam) it becomes a spectrum of spiritual creativity. Tibetan tradition is the profound of Buddhism, wherein meditational universes of siünyată are both hunnan and cosmic and purify our world by making it divine. My father Prof. RaghuVira was gripped by an ineffable fascination for this Land of intense and profound life. As a young boy he became immersed in Sanskrit grammar where the words were esoteric insights into the flow of the human mind. The grammar of Panini and the immensity of the exegetical formulations of Patanjali in the Mahābhāsya were revelations of sabda as Brahman. As a student at the School of Oriental Studies of the University of London he found a new world of Sanskrit grammatical texts in Tibetan in the Tanjur. Their Sanskrit originals had been lost. He learnt Tibetan and tried to correct the Sanskrit restorations of Liebich, as we learn from a letter of Prof. F.W. Thomas, Oxford. I inherit his interest in Tibet, whose 'go-with-me' is a journey to a spiritual home, so that we do not walk home to discover ourselves homeless. Tibet is the depth of the profound against the wild night of the negation of values.